White Heat Death
by Clair1755
Summary: The Doctor and her companion investigate a mysterious tower in Swinging 60s London. A remake of the War Machines. Fan!Doctor. Doctor Who is the property of the BBC.
1. Coalescence

_WHITE HEAT DEATH_

By Clair1755

Based on _The War Machines_

 _The War Machines_

Written by Ian Stuart Black

Idea by Kit Pedler

Pokémon is the property of the Pokémon Company.

There was a great whoosh and a few grinds, and the TARDIS materialised in London, 1966. The Doctor and her companion Vic stepped out.

The breeze fluttered amiably, and pleasant sunlight shone. The Time Lady detected an ion maelstrom with her wristlet and gestured to the skyline.

"There's something mysterious about that tower yonder, I can sense it!" She was pointing to the Spire, a recent addition in the heart of the city.

"I guess we're going there," Vic replied with a familiar, knowing smile. The Doctor played giddily with the ends of her thick blonde mane and her eyes sparkled.

The top of the tower gave a panoramic view of the whole city. Banks of computers filled the central room. Blue and yellow lights flickered everywhere as the whole network hummed like a boiler.

"This is all very exciting!" enthused the Doctor as she tried to resist the urge to flick a switch or turn a dial.

"The computer never makes mistakes," said the scientist in charge, a thin Irishman called Professor Nash. "Its name is Cell and it's a state-of-the-art machine. Utterly remarkable. It can hold the bank details of over fifty million customers."

The rebel Time Lady bent over the switches, stroking them with her pliable fingers. She spoke into a small microphone imbedded in a left console near one of Cell's monitors.

"Hi, Cell. What is the cube of 291?"

"24,642,171." The voice was automated but based on stage recordings of Laurence Olivier.  
"Well done, dearie. Can you decompose Hammond's cube into its prime factors?

Cell pronounced the correct numbers and printed out paper copies of its internal calculations and argumentation. The Doctor folded the sheets up, beaming like a proud parent. She put the papers in her sky-blue coat. _How lovely._

There was a very quiet sigh that the Doctor's sensitive ears nonetheless detected.

"What's the matter, Vic? Are you all right?" The Time Lady had noticed her companion's distracted eyes.

"Sorry," replied Vic, "I've just never liked computers. I'll be at the Kernel," he said, referring to a popular swinging disco the Doctor had described. The iconoclastic Gallifreyan smiled.

Following a technical discussion about Cell with Professor Nash and his colleague Professor Fredericks at the tower the Doctor drove in the Hilux to a scientific conference in Vinegar Street. The lead speaker, a high-ranking civil servant by the name of Sir Anselm Ashby with whom the Doctor was well-acquainted extolled the brilliance of the new supercomputer. Yet, the Time Lady was perturbed by what she heard. _So much artificial intelligence. So much foresight._ She began trying to wrestle her wavy tresses into a chignon. _I hope they know what they're doing._ Humorously, the Doctor noticed the rotund Sir Anselm's continued resemblance to Harold Wilson. _Just as in Innsbruck._

At the Kernel,a redhaired girl and her boyfriend soon struck up a conversation with Vic. Thankfully, bytecode was not on the agenda. Christine Russell, an Avicenna Street secretary, was ebullient but her boyfriend, Joe Hoyle was despondent. He'd been passed over for promotion at the airbase. Again. Vic bought them all a round and listened to Joe's grumbles about senior officers and Christine's chatter about the Beach Boys.

Professor Nash was leaving the control room for the evening when his friend, the technophile Admiral Sangster appeared in the doorway.

"You will not leave," spoke Cell in its clipped, synthesised voice.

The supercomputer creaked and whirred. Nash twisted his tie and jerked backwards. He fell under mind the control of the machine. As did the admiral, with even less of a fight.

The barman at the Kernel, Wicks, handed the phone to Vic when it rang. "Hello, who is it?" Vic asked. Hypnotic trills and screeches emanated from the receiver.

"Mankind has stalled," said Professor Nash. "Further human progress is impossible. Cellwill take over. The machines are now our masters."

He was talking to his colleague Fredericks, who, having been about to sign on for the night shift, declared him psychotic and ran for the door. The supercomputer, Cell, kept beeping. Its fiendish power was too strong and radiated outward in consistent undulations.

"Machines are the servants of man…" Fredericks proclaimed before she too fell under the computer's spell.

"What do you want to happen?" asked Fredericks, addressing the evil computer.

"We need the brilliance of the Doctor," declared Nash, enunciating each syllable in an unnatural, clipped fashion. "Her brilliance will allow us to conquer the galaxy. To use her, we require her associate."

Vic entered, the commands of Cell dictating his every motion _á la_ a marionette. Or an automaton.

"What are my instructions?" Vic's intonation was robotic and severe, so unlike his usual upbeat character.

"We need the Doctor. Bring her here."

"Understood."

"Begin the construction of the daughter machines," boomed Cell.

About an hour later, the Doctor found herself chatting to the friendly Wicks and Christine and Joe at the Kernel. Alas, Vic was nowhere to be found. He hadn't said where he was going when he left. Despondent due to her friend's absence and confused by the questions many patrons were asking her about David Bailey, the Doctor slipped back outside and drove off in her pickup truck.

On the way journey to Sir Anselm's – the mandarin had kindly offered her a room for the night – the Doctor caught sight of an elder gentleman in a cape and astrakhan walking by in the summer evening, hand in hand with a befezzed Aztec lady. The Time Lady waved to the couple but neither one noticed her.

A bearded vagrant scrambled out of a black cab by a riverside warehouse and just about managed to give the fare. Nash was watching, and then went inside.

"We must start construction at once," declared Nash loudly to a huddle of will-less slaves. "Our machines are going to be so beautiful, so beautiful, and progressive taxation _will_ pay for them! A new dawn for humanity is approaching! All peoples shall love the supremacy of Cell!"

The vagrant, Gerald Priest, formerly of the Royal Marines, was puzzled and alarmed by Nash's ramblings.

"Time is short," declared Nash. "Be careful. There is a stranger among us!"

Priest shuffled around the junkyard as quietly as he could, heart thumping.

"Cover the door, do not let him escape!" Nash ordered. The workers rose from their task, tools in hand. Priest ran for his life from the warehouse and threw himself into the Thames to escape his pursuers. Fortunately, he was a good swimmer.

"By Augustus!" the Doctor cried, now decamped in the lounge of Sir Anselm's London property. She doffed her pince-nez (worn for appearance's sake). The Time Lady sat down on a pouffe and re-read the disturbing article in the day's _Telegraph_. An avaricious child murderer had fallen to his death in Oxford while being apprehended by the police. _All for money…_

Using one of her gemstone communicators the Doctor sent her coordinates to Vic and after a while he finally arrived, talking rigidly about events in Rhodesia. He was also quick to suggest a return to the Spire.

"I think we'd better phone ahead first," the Doctor responded warily. She was suspicious, though of what or whom she was not certain. Something was strange about Vic but she was too cocky and trusting to feel threatened by him. Lifting the earphone of Sir Anselm's telephone, the Time Lady dialled the tower's number and asked for Professor Nash. Cellwas still on; the Doctor could hear its droning whirr grind, trill and creak. A weird and unsettling signal suddenly burst through the line.

"Oh no, you don't!" yelled the Gallifreyan rebel defiantly, and pulled the phone from its socket. "Don't try to strangle me either," she added, glowering at the detached cable. She stomped the casing of the handset with her steel-capped boots and scratched the bakelite.

"You made contact, didn't you?" asked Vic. He stood at the Doctor's side, his eyes unfocused and his legs swaying.

"Something's afoot," said the Doctor to herself. "And it's not attached to my calf… Villainy!" Without warning, the Doctor turned and pointed at Vic, the bejewelled index finger of her left hand outstretched.

"Stay right where you are, my man!" the Prydonian shouted, a thunderclap of Gallifreyan might in a sweet King's Road accent. Vic stopped as if he had been frozen.

"Look at me, Vic!" The Doctor stared deep into the young man's globes, probing Vic's mind with her cerulean irises. Sir Anselm and his manservant Ignatius entered the room, intrigued by the commotion.

"It's as I feared," stated the Doctor gravely to the two men. "He's been hypnotised. Zeroes and ones can ensnare anybody."

The Doctor unclasped her pendant and waved it in front of Vic's face like a metronome. The pendant consisted of a small seal of Rassilon on a chain that this incarnation of the Doctor nearly invariably wore as she was a good Gallifreyan girl in this body (as if!). Today, the rich metal it was made from was a dark cinnabar Icaron star alloy.

Vic's eyes followed the swings of the enchanting object and soon sleep caught him. The Doctor caught her friend with the aid of Sir Anselm and Ignatius as Vic dozed off. Together, the three eased the heavy man onto the sofa. The Doctor stroked her friend's whiskered cheek with tenderness and then straightened up.

"Put him abed," ordered the Time Lady, a shade of aristocracy creeping into her voice. "Give him every comfort and luxury. He'll be asleep for days, poor lad." Upstairs, she and Ignatius tucked Vic into bed in Sir Anselm's four-poster. The Doctor folded an extra blanket and placed it under Vic's pillow to support his head.

An unremarkable van arrived at the construction site. Some mobile descendants of Cell were let out, known as the Nuclei, and they slid across the tarmacadam. Each machine was equipped with a Skarosian-style plunger and various other threatening appendages. Weapons. The machines rolled smoothly in any direction on inset wheels. The enthralled Admiral Sangster stood by at the unloading, officious and sinistrous. The digital trill was singing in his head, expanding to encompass every thought he had.


	2. Fusion

The following morning a cheerful Christine came to talk to the Doctor. The dejected Joe had been put to bed at last.

"Where's Vic?" asked Christine to the young woman to the time traveller once the latter had explained the previous night's events.

"The country," the Doctor replied. "He needs some rest, poor dear. Now, I need you to investigate a yard on the river near Wapping. Rumours tell of secretive constructions going on there. Or at least, that's what my irregular contacts tell me."

"What are you going to do?"

"Calculations, my dear girl, calculations."

"Are you from the theatre?"

"I beg your pardon?" asked the bemused Doctor.

Christine grinned but didn't say anything. The Doctor went to update her parking ticket.

"Your car's quite strange!" teased the girl.

Christine slipped into the warehouse at Wapping later that day, the Doctor having bribed her with Terra Alphan chocolates and the latest Beach Boys LP. The drilling potency of the Nuclei were being tested. The machines slid effortlessly across the ground like boxy hovercrafts. Each device whirred shrilly and monotonously like a siren of white heat death.

Admiral Sangster espied the intruder. Joe went to fetch Christine on the factory floor and grabbed her by the shoulders.

"You must join us," he said. "The Nuclei will guide our progress. Cell is the master."

Joe was now under the control of the machines, at least in part. The robots' whines were getting louder and louder.

"Have you gone mad?! What are you doing?" Christine protested as she tussled with her possessed boyfriend. He frenetically grasped at her arms and elbows.

Sir Anselm Ashby quaffed his glass of Merlot and paid attention to his friend the Time Lady.

"Don't go to the police. No, never do that. We must investigate on our own," advised the Doctor, waving her pretty hands for emphasis. "The force behind all this is uncommonly powerful. We must be perspicacious but also forceful when the need arises."

Sir Anselm nodded, absorbing the strange woman's information with confidence. He trusted her. After all, she had saved his life twice before, during the Thurso incident. _Not to mention_ , noted Anselm with an internal smile, _for all her eccentricities she really is uncommonly beautiful. Something of Bardot about her. Her teeth are perfect. Wife number three?_

The Doctor continued, incognisant of the mental images she was conjuring: "I've been in scrapes like this before. I'm trying to remember…" She tapped the side of her head. "We must be the serpent 'neath the flower. Yes, that's it!"

"We all must work toward the victory of this great cause," proclaimed Joe to the terrified Christine as she tried to flee the warehouse. "Cell has given us our next, most glorious mission."

Joe's voice was filled with the cruel and arrogant clarity of a fundamentalist preacher, but he didn't seem to be chasing his girlfriend with much enthusiasm. The young man's body seemed somewhat dazed and reluctant to follow the fanatical instructions, however lucid his speech. Was he fighting the programming, Christine wondered.

On the makeshift factory floor Professor Fredericks commanded the machines to take over every local centre of human habitation and amenity.

"London will be taken over by the machines of salvation," expounded Joe as he hammered in attachments to the Nuclei boxes with threatening thuds. "Soon, all of humanity will be under their control." Christine made a dash for the exit, hot blood and adrenaline pumping inside her. Nausea was creeping in, too.

Sangster was also in the building, speechifying as if he were an extremist demagogue. The secretary tried to force open the peeling wooden door of the warehouse. Multiple chisels were needed. Joe kept talking. Sangster kept raving.

The Doctor stopped playing makruk with herself and made to leave. She was going to seek out Christine. Then, the very girl returned, bruised, shaken and crying.

"Doll! What's happened to you?" The Doctor was aghast at the young woman's distress.

"It's these machines. They're hypnotising, killer machines! They're controlling him! It's all so loopy but that's what happened!" The Doctor hugged the poor girl.

"She has escaped," said Joe, his eyes athwart.

Admiral Sangster demanded the young man to go to Cell for 'decommissioning'.

"It's impossible!" Sir Anselm declaimed.

"Go to the police, please!" pleaded Christine.

"The attack is at one o'clock tomorrow, yes?" The Doctor was thinking methodically.

"Yes, that's what I heard them say!"

"I shall handle this in my own way," announced Sir Anselm and immediately dropped a line to the Home Office.

"Code Two-Fox. Nova. Very urgent. Killer machines, I've been told. Suppressing free will. Very dangerous." The Doctor held her tongue and made Christine a cup of tea.

Soldiers were deployed on London's streets. The respected Major Browning, the officer in charge, spoke to Sir Anselm, who had now donned his old uniform.

"This could be dangerous," advised Sir Anselm, recalling a supposedly relevant escapade in the North Pennines five years previously. The soldiers prepared to storm the riverside warehouse. Browning bade good luck to his men and his soldiers slid open the door.

Admiral Sangster enjoined the Nuclei to crush and destroy. Within seconds a phalange of forklift-sized machines advanced on the platoon, screeching dreadfully. Boxes and crates flew everywhere as more and more Nuclei burst into the fray. Bullets rebounded. The machines shot a choking dust at the infantrymen followed by their own bullets and missiles. Several brave men slumped to floor, spattered in blood. Others suffered cuts and burns to their faces and chests.

All vision, save the infrared of the Nuclei, was obscured in a chemical mist. Admiral Sangster seemed unaffected, so deep in the mind control was he. Many hand to hand tussles took place between the army and the possessed workers. Soon, the injured platoon was forced to retreat, taking a handful of incapacitated workers with them. Throughout it all the incessant drone of the machines of war cut the air. Admiral Sangster continued to give bloodthirsty orders even as his voice strained. One Nucleus followed the troop across the docklands. It lit fires as it came, attempting to trap the servicemen with smoke.

Sir Anselm implored the machine to stop, knowing that its aluminium hide could not withstand the bazooka he held shakily in his hands. Nevertheless, the machine still advanced with defiant siren screams. Then, the machinery of every weapon froze before the Nucleus. The soldiers fell back from the menacing tank.

Only the Doctor stood in the machine's way with a straight posture and an imperious glare aflame in her azure globes. Madwoman.


	3. Ignition

More boxes and pallets were shoved over. More beeping and whirrs. The Doctor fixed the glittering bands on her fingers but did not back down. The evil machine shrilled like a banshee. But it stopped. It did stop.

All over the nation, the frightened media announced the latest developments. The prognosis wasn't good. The machines were on the glide. A new horror menaced the city.

Back at his house Sir Anselm was boasting to a government minister (one of the less important ones) about his wise decision to send in a platoon. The Doctor's lip curled.

At another workshop, construction of the deadly machines continued apace. And at another. And another. Nash checked the controls on the new machines. Forwards. Backwards. Rotate. Guns up, guns down. Spray. Detonate.

At the Spire, Fredericks increased the intensity of the broadcast signals.

In some good news, Admiral Sangster had been captured but was very confused and incoherent. Such disorientation was symptomatic of mechanical hypnosis. _Binary-pulsed mind control,_ according to the Doctor. _A cruel skill accessible to any sufficiently powerful informatic system._ She implored the humans to develop Oldman fail-safes when the crisis was over. Sangster, like Vic, was sent to recover in the countryside under the auspices of an old acquaintance of the Doctor. The Time Lady hoped all would be well, in time.

Of course, the current reports on the machines were increasingly grim. Sieges in Lambeth. Deaths in Mayfair. A hostage situation at Westminster. King's Cross and Exhibition Road had been overrun and more and more people were being brainwashed into the machines' servitude. Every radio broadcast was capable of being hijacked by Cell and its children, as the Doctor's company had found to their cost when four of the soldiers turned after catching a snippet of the _Light Programme_.

"If they've got Joe," declared Christine to the recusant Time Lady, "they could have moved him to any one of their makeshift factories around the city!"

"Fret not petal, he will be fine!" the Doctor responded, her tone an odd mixture of kindness and sharpness. Christine loured, and the Doctor, frowning, began to pace. Time for a theory.

"All the machines are electromagnetically controlled," began the esteemed time traveller. Her listeners were Major Browning's squadron but the renowned military experience of the Prydonian spoke before her.

"The source must be unilaterally centralised at a point of high or low altitude to thwart disruptions… The tower! Yes, of course! The Spire! We've got to go there and short-circuit that control unit I saw!"

The Doctor ran over to the folded newspaper of the coffee table and quickly filled in fifteen across in the crossword.

"Saboteurs, assemble!" the time traveller cried to the rushing troops.

On a nearby street, Major Browning and a party of his surviving men-at-arms set up a clever trap to capture a Nucleus. It wasn't long before a marauding Nucleus hove into view. Metallic gird ropes hemmed the machine inside a narrow rectangle and all electrical currents rebounded inwards as in a Faraday cage. The machine ground to a halt and one of its lances broke off. The Doctor climbed inside the cordon and, after some tapping and banging, removed the machine's start motor.

The Doctor's reprogrammedNucleus, nicknamed Benedict Arnold or B.A. in the Time Lady's head,slid its way towards the tower as the Doctor and Christine sped there in the Hilux. The pickup sent a Nucleus that was foolish enough to stand in its way flying into the air and down onto the pavement. Flanks of the Major's men followed carefully behind. Everything was to converge at the Spire. The final moves.

Rainclouds gathered over London. The two women and their turncoat machine crossed the deserted lobby of the skyscraper and ascended its great lift with a somnolent sense of dread. The cuboid rose up and up inside the shaft as the city shrank below.

At the BBC, Donald Hacker was on the telephone to his counterpart in New York City. Donald wanted to know if any similar disturbances had been reported in other countries. He was told no, but it occurred to him that might be what the manipulative machines _wanted_ him to think.

Christine found Joe at the control room in the tower, still under Cell's malevolent thrall. He stood still by the window, a weighty toolbox in his hand.

"We have to go, Joe!" beseeched his girlfriend.

"No! I must serve Cell! He leads us! He leads us all!"

There was an almighty crash and B.A. burst into the room. Cell briefly halted its hideous noises. The possessed scientists rose from their computer banks and switches. Brainwashed, straggling guards started to fight back, brandishing rudimentary weapons.

The confrontation was bluntly short and sanguineous. B.A.'s hyperchromatic lasers and missiles rapidly laid waste to Cell's circuit bank, screens and memory, and, tragically, Fredericks and Nash as well. The Doctor lowered her gaze at the sight of their collapsed corpses, as well as those of other victims whose names the she had never learned. Scientists. Workmen. Passers-by. Young and old. The time traveller exhaled. _Like Sea Base 4. Arcadia. May the supreme quintessence guide you all. Vile machines._ Acrid bile soared in Christine's throat as well. Oblivious, Joe unpacked two thick screwdrivers from the toolbox.

Sensing a movement in the bloodied room the Time Lady looked up and shot the armed Joe with a sleeping dart from one of her bangles. The two women caught him as he sank to the floor. Grateful for her current body's dedication to physical exercise, the Doctor helped Christine carry the pilot across the storey to the Spire's great elevator. With an aggrieved aggressiveness Christine punched the 'ground floor' button. She began to cry, and the Doctor put her braceleted arms around Christine and let the girl sob into the starred inside of her coat.

The street level below was a mess of damaged cars and buildings and alarms, while the machines that had caused the destruction sat as immobile as gravestones. Naturally, the dependable Hilux was unscathed. The three survivors climbed inside as an afternoon drizzle started. The Doctor began to adjust the Hilux's radio and carefully analysed each arriving pulse with her sonic sunglasses. She soon determined that the threat of the machines had been defanged. No more transmissions. The Doctor used the glasses to relay the happy message, grinning like a Mega-Evolved Gengar. At last, London breathed a well-deserved sigh of relief.

"Next time," said the Doctor, clearly and with conviction as cars returned to the streets, " _I_ will be the one to investigate the sinister depot alone." Christine laughed and after a moment the Doctor did too. The rain outside came down slightly more heavily. Joe spluttered and mumbled something incoherent that didn't sound mechanical. Christine kissed him. Amidst the light splashes, which were increasing in frequency, the Doctor resolved to show her new friends the TARDIS when the time was right.

After checking the pirate stations and the Gond satellites the Doctor returned to the BBC. Thus, she found out that _The Archers_ was still on, that the Prime Minister had just returned from Moscow and missed everything. In addition, the England football team were ahead at Goodison Park. Although she was more of a cricket and badminton fan, the Doctor resolved to buy a flag for the losing team.

To aid Joe's recuperation the Doctor paid for a week at the Ritz for the airman and Christine, all expenses paid by the Gallifreyan's apparently capacious funds. Upon the Time Lady's return to his house (to supply a replacement telephone and collect an astrolabe), Sir Anselm suggested dinner between the Doctor and himself, but the latter told him that she already had a date with the Shadows.

The following day the Time Lady travelled up in the Hilux to visit a convalescing Vic in the village of Sutton's End. _A rural break._ The Doctor listened to some Zibelian hard rock on the journey and a dash of Duran Duran. The metaphorical blood on her hands troubled her that day, as did the question marks of humanity's relative future. _Time brings such woes to be._ The Prydonian renegade tapped out a rhythm of five on the dashboard.

The End


End file.
